Barrow detective targets Internet predators

Posted: Sunday, March 09, 2008

WINDER - As Internet-savvy as most teenagers think they are, they're always shocked when Barrow County sheriff's Detective Lisa Carr shows them how a stranger can use their MySpace page to find out where they live, where they go to school and what they do for fun.

"At this point their mouths are hanging wide open," Carr said, standing in front of a satellite photo of her own home that she found using her stepson's old MySpace.com screen name, home town and school information.

Then, she tells students that the average sex offender commits 62 offenses before getting caught and that one in seven children and teenagers who've been online have been sexually solicited.

They're horrified.

Even she's still a little shocked by the numbers, and she's been teaching the class for two years, she said.

Carr, who investigates child abuse and Internet sex crimes for the Barrow County Sheriff's Office, is one a handful of local investigators in Georgia who has been trained by the Georgia Bureau Investigation's Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force to investigate child exploitation and abuse crimes that involve the Internet.

MORE INFO

Visit Georgias CyberSafety site, set up to protect children against Internet crime: www.familyinternet.info

Barrow County authorities have made three arrests for child pornography in past six months, more than all of the arrests made in Athens and four surrounding counties over the past year. One was a sheriff's deputy, Jason David Gaub, who Carr and agents from the GBI charged with 20 counts of sexual exploitation of child in October. Another came just a few weeks ago, when Carr arrested William J. Schnipelsky, 39, of Winder after receiving a tip from the GBI task force, searching his home and finding more than a dozen pornographic images on his computer.

However, Carr's training by the GBI's Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force is about more than giving police the tools to catch bad guys - it's about giving teenagers and parents the tools they need to keep their families safe, she said.

"It's really got to be a collaborative effort between parents and law enforcement that's going to keep these people away from our kids," Carr said.

Since 2003, the GBI has offered Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force training in how to investigate Internet crimes, how to pose as a juvenile to catch predators and how to handle legal issues when people commit an online crime in another county or state, said John Whitaker, special agent in charge of the task force.

The GBI has agents who specialize in investigating Internet sex crimes across the state. But having someone in Barrow County who a teenager can reach quickly means that they'll be more likely to report suspicious activity on the Internet, Carr said.

All they have to do is shoot her an e-mail or drop her a line on the MySpace.com page she's created for the Barrow County Sheriff's Office.

It doesn't take any new staff or funding for a law enforcement agency to become a part of the GBI task force, Whitaker said. The GBI requires that at least one of the agency's detectives attend eight days of training, and the state will provide computers and tracking software to use during Internet investigations. The detectives then have to tell the GBI how many and what kinds of cases they investigate each year, Whitaker said.

Despite the extra training opportunities, only 65 law enforcement agencies in Georgia have taken advantage of the certification, said Whitaker. The Barrow County Sheriff's Office is the only agency in the Athens area.

"For the smaller departments, it's just a manpower issue," Whitaker said. "Even if they don't have to put any money into the program, their investigators have already got enough on their plate. You've got to remember that the majority of departments in Georgia only have 10 officers."

But even in slightly larger departments, detectives often turn cases over to GBI.

"What has happened in the past is someone here will get some kind of tip," said David Cochran, chief deputy with the Jackson County Sheriff's Office. "Then we'll turn that information over to the GBI. We have a pretty clear line of communication with them.

"Sex crimes in general are very time-consuming for us, but the ones stemming from Internet sites are not something many of us have done," he said. "As it is now, we're having to devote everything we have for the crimes we deal with on a day-to-day basis."

Lt. David Kilpatrick, who works most of the computer-based crimes for the Oconee County Sheriff's Office, said he can't remember any busts for Internet child solicitation or exploitation in Oconee County. The closest the Oconee County Sheriff's Office has come to charging someone with Internet-based sex crime is when two North Oconee High School girls were threatened with charges of distributing lewd material to minors after they posted salacious gossip about their classmates on MySpace.com.

But a lack of arrests for Internet-based child exploitation or abuse really isn't proof that crimes aren't happening, Whitaker said.

Just because Barrow County has arrested more people for child pornography than any other area county over the last 12 months doesn't mean Barrow County is home to more predators, Whitaker said.

"It probably means they're working harder at it than the other counties," he said.